The Vibe Shift
France is currently in its feelings, and cinema is mirroring the mood. The new film Notre Salut (released in English as A Man of His Time) is crushing the box office right now, and the reason is highkey unsettling. Instead of a standard WW2 hero epic, it focuses on the "grassroots"—the regular admins and bureaucrats who kept the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime running while 76,000 Jewish people were deported to concentration camps.
Why it's hitting different
Director Emmanuel Marre, who snagged a best screenplay prize at Cannes, based the film on letters he found in his own family’s drawer about his great-grandfather, a mid-level administrator under Marshal Philippe Pétain. The film isn't a history lecture; it uses modern lighting and 80s Europop to make the past feel way too close to home.
Historian Marc Olivier Baruch points out that the scariest part isn't a villain monologuing—it’s the main character obsessing over the cost of straw and chamber pots for cattle trucks. It’s that chilling "just doing my job" energy that people are finding so eerie.
Why it matters
Real talk: France is heading into a presidential election with the far-right National Rally party leading the polls. Critics and historians suggest that younger audiences are watching this to understand how democracies slowly crumble and how "the mechanism of renouncing democratic values" actually works. As Marre puts it, France spent decades sweeping its collaborationist past under the rug to survive, but now it’s time to finally open those drawers. The plot thickens because, for many in 2026, the question of how far-right movements gain power isn't just history—it's the current discourse.
